Trivia/Info

John Flansburgh in an interview with Rolling Stone: "There's a version of 'Istanbul (Not Constantinople)' that we assembled just to make a video out of it. That's an interesting recording because even though it's totally electronic, it was actually recorded live. It sounds completely tracked. I mean it doesn't sound like a band – it sounds like electronic music – but it’s actually the five of us in a room playing."[1]

The electronic sounds in this song were generated by John Linnell using a circuit bentSpeak & Spell and Roland SP-303 sampler, Dan Miller using a microKORG synthesizer, including the attached vocoder, and Danny Weinkauf playing an Alesis micron synthesizer. The robotic voice asking "shall we play?" is an audio sample of WOPR, a computer from the 1983 film WarGames.